fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, UK. He was the recipient of the British Association of American Studies Honorary Fellowship in 2014, and winner of the Richard Neustadt Book Prize in 2010. He is the author of Reagan: American Icon (2016), named by The Times/Sunday Times as a Politics Book of the Year.
Morgan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, FDR: Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book comes at the end of the chapter entitled ‘Second Emancipator’, which assesses Franklin D. Roosevelt’s record as president in improving conditions for African Americans. It emphasizes the dichotomy between the New Deal’s unprecedented socio-economic assistance to blacks in the depressed 1930s, mainly in the form of unemployment relief, and its failure to advance their civil rights, notably through enactment of legislation to make lynching a federal crime, because of FDR’s reluctance to antagonize powerful Southern Democrats whose support he needed in Congress. On page 99, however, I deal with Roosevelt’s evasions on an issue that straddled economic security and civil rights, namely black exclusion from decently paid jobs in the nation’s rapidly expanding defense industries in the year before America entered World War 2. Exasperated by FDR’s prevarications, African American trade union leader A. Philip Randolph launched the March on Washington Movement to organize a 100,000-strong demonstration demanding equal black access to defence jobs, which was to culminate with a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on July 1, 1941. In the pages that immediately follow, I show how FDR agreed to issue Executive Order 8802 prohibiting discrimination in the defense industries, the first presidential proclamation on black rights since Reconstruction, in return for getting the March called off, but did little to ensure that its terms were followed because of his need for Southern Democratic support for his international policies.Learn more about FDR: Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America at the publisher's website.
The Page 99 Test works up to a point – but not totally – for my book. It shows that FDR was far bolder in pursuing socio-economic reforms beneficial to the broad coalition of Democratic voters in his first term in office than he was in promoting black rights in his second and third terms. By 1941, the New Deal had run its course as a reform programme. FDR now focused almost exclusively on international affairs in manoeuvring to assist Britain and, eventually the Soviet Union in their struggle with Germany without making the United States a formal participant in the war. Conservative Southern Democrats in Congress, who had opposed his second-term efforts to expand the New Deal, had become essential allies in this campaign. Once the US itself was at war, they would support Roosevelt’s efforts to ensure that the United States remained the principal actor in upholding post-war peace once the Axis powers were defeated. Roosevelt would not risk alienating them by pressing to advance black interests.
The FDR that my book presents is a president who had a long-term vision about where he wanted to lead America in both domestic and international affairs but was willing to make improvisations and compromises in recognition of political reality in the short-term. He transformed the presidency, making it the driving force of politics and policy in American government. He was instrumental in creating the welfare state as New Deal president in the 1930s and the warfare state as commander-in-chief in the early 1940s. Despite its limitations, New Deal economic assistance converted African Americans from their devotion to the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, into a bedrock of support for the Democratic party outside the South from the 1934 midterms onwards. Even FDR’s limited civil rights initiatives laid the foundations for his successors to build upon. Coercion rather than conviction may have brought it about, but his issuance of Executive Order 8802 effectively recognized racial equality as a legitimate issue for presidential concern.
--Marshal Zeringue
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